


His Name Is Tyler Durden.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club (Novel)
Genre: Community: contrelamontre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-08-30
Updated: 2003-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-02 18:59:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyler Durden did more than start a revolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Name Is Tyler Durden.

**Author's Note:**

> For the contrelamontre 'world at its knees' challenge. (August, 2003)

Tyler fucks me, after that Tyler says we need to take Project Mayhem to another level.

"Fuck history," he says. "The past is worthless, as stupid as yesterday. On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate reaches zero."

I tell him I don't want the world at its knees.

Marla calls the next morning, wonders if I'm going to Testicular Cancer. Melanoma. Brain parasites.

I say, "no."

She says, "good."

My boss fucked me good once after a flight where I did my formula and came up wanting.

"Do you ever wonder if you'll die in one of our cars?"

No, I answer. I drive our competitor.

What did he think, that I had a death wish? At fight club, the sounds turn real low and you can't hear anything, but you're so pumped, more than caffeine can get you.

This is adrenaline.

Get enough pain and it'll start to feel good, so good you won't want it to stop.

I never got the hole in my cheek fixed.

Marla wants to die from anything but cancer. She says, I want you to fuck me until I hemorrhage out of my eye sockets. I say, Tyler isn't home. Try again later.

Big Bob made me cry, after that Tyler fucked me into the bed so hard he couldn't walk straight for a weekk. I found his come on my sheets and used bad soap to clean him off.

We are the waste product of our parent's generation.

We are the sludge at the bottom of your too-expensive mocha latte that Project Mayhem collectively pissed into.

We are nothing.

Only when you have lost everything are you free to do anything.

I know this, because Tyler knows this.

People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden. I say, paraffin doesn't work, use sawdust. If you're going to dial everything back to zero, bring evolution to the people, you might as well make sure your bombs work.

Use orange juice in napalm.

Tyler and I went dancing, that was the night we slept in the Impala for fear of Marla's wrath. Tyler wrapped his hand around my cock and started jerking me.

He said, you once could give someone cancer.

He said, your father forgot a condom. Too bad for you.

Tyler was always full of cheerful things like that.

He said, space monkeys never understand why they're being sent to die.

"That's progress."

"Progress is a disease," Tyler says. Imagine hunting elk through every department store that turn their noses up at everyone but them.

"I thought it was a myth." Imagine fishing in the Reflecting Pool, or climbing the Rotunda to catch a bird that nests in the rafters.

"It's both." Tyler says. Imagine the world as we know it, overgrown by what it used to be.

"Oh."

Big Bob's been standing outside our door for days now and every night Tyler's careful to make as much noise as possible when he pounds me into the table or makes me play sixty nine with a space monkey.

Tomorrow I'll read in the paper about how the thirteenth level of the Hart Building got nerve-gassed and the man I sucked off the night before will ask for another go.

"Don't know," I say. "Impress me."

A mouthful of semen isn't too high a price to pay for progress, Tyler says.

Progress can suck my dick.

There are space monkeys making soap in the basement and I wonder who died for it. When a ten-ton ball of concrete comes rolling out of a display case, you'll wonder what Tyler Durden would do.

Why, sit and laugh.

I don't go out to eat anymore. Men with black eyes and entire hands in splits say, "sorry, sir. Clam chowder isn't...sir."

"All right," I say finally, before I stop doing this all together. "Give me clean food."

We are all the recipients of our own destruction.

Where you are right now, you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like.

I say, "Show me your hand." I kiss it. I smile. Blood from my cheek runs through my teeth and I look like a cannibal playing mind games, all dressed in a suit and tie. I say, "bring the lye. Dump it out over your hand."

This is a chemical burn and it will hurt more than anything you've ever felt in your life.

I say, "pain is temporary, but chaos is insanity."

And I used to be such a nice guy.

I show my gun and the twelve ID cards that Tyler had me photocopy and stick to the bedroom wall. Tyler recites their names as he fucks me into the Army surplus mattress. "Donald R. Russman. Patrick A. Quincy."

Nice Anglo-shit names.

I say, "can't you rob a Mexican?"

Tyler says, "you're missing the point."

Even the Mona Lisa's falling apart. Our fathers were our models for god. My father bailed.

Marla's mother sends over collagen and Tyler and I make soap with the space monkeys. Money to buy place tickets to set up fight clubs to fund our revolution.

You wake up in SeaTac.

Tyler comes back and says, "I put a guy in the hospital after six minutes."

"Wow," I say. "Did he have insurance?"

The man had insurance, was back on his feet, and two weeks later showed up on Paper Street.

Everyone's always asking me do I know Tyler Durden.

We make soap in the kitchen, on long tables built by space monkeys after they've shaved off all their body fair and put five hundred dollars in their shoes.

Tyler likes his boys hairless.

DNA, he says, is carried in all things. You give it away for free.

You rob a man of his hair, you rob him of something that makes him profoundly himself.

You are not a special and unique snowflake. You are the same decomposing waste as everyone else.

DNA's the one thing you give to your kids that they can't give back.

I am Jack's complete apathy.

Putting on a ski mask is harder than it looks. We don't make space monkeys out of people who refuse to wear contacts. You just can't fit a mask over glasses.

I piss in a bowl of soup for old times' sake and watch a porno that has eight hundred and sixty three frames missing. Tyler sits next to me and jerks me off.

He says, "you could bottle this and give some lonely woman a tax exemption."

I say, "I can't imagine me with kids."

I'm a thirty year old boy, and Tyler takes me from behind and puts me to bed every night.

The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Would you like your life in cornflower blue?

Or pressed by a disgruntled worked who knows you won't tip and probably won't pick up the Sacks Fifth Avenue burgundy silk strapless stress you dropped off last week?

I say, expectation is overrated.

Tyler sticks a gun in my mouth and the holes are drilled wrong. If he fires it, it'll go off in his hand. If he doesn't, the building explodes. Either way, we're fucked. Either way, we're out of Project Mayhem. His name is Tyler Durden. His name is Tyler Durden. Insomnia made him and sleep feeds him. His name is Tyler Durden, and he had cancer for ten minutes. His name is Tyler Durden.

Tyler used paraffin.

Paraffin has never, ever, worked for me.

I can't blow a hole in my cheek, I tell him. I already have one.

That's ok, he says. You can have another.

So we pull the trigger.


End file.
